by cameron | Jul 20, 2009 | science
With the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, I’ve been reading up on the conspiracy theories, for and against. I personally don’t think it *was* faked, although it’s an interesting idea.
Apparently a 1999 Gallup poll found that 6% of Americans doubted the Apollo 11 moon landing happened.
What made me think of this lately was the incredible news that NASA taped over the original moon landing footage! And then they recently had Hollywood "clean up" copies of the footage, George Lucas-style. I wonder if this time, we’ll see Buzz Aldrin shoot first? Anyway, I read that and thought "OMFG the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this news."
So I posted up a quick (and yes, badly worded) twtpoll today asking people what THEY thought about the moon landings – fake or not?
Yes, yes, I *know* it’s a small sample size (to all the haters out there) – when did you think a twtpoll was a scientific research methodology?
What’s interesting to me is how the attitudes of the Twittersphere differ from the general public. If this is an accurate sample of the Twittersphere in general (and not just my followers), does it suggest we are more skeptical of our governments that the general public? Or is it a product of the past decade since the Gallup poll? Or it is Australians (who probably make up at least 25% of my followers) are more skeptical than Americans about the event?
For all of the people who replied that the folks who think it might have been faked are morons, let me ask you – why do you believe so strongly? What evidence do YOU have that they DON’T have?
Let me also ask:
Do you think the USA *could* have faked it if it wanted to? Seems possible to me. People say "how could THAT many people keep a secret?" but how many people REALLY needed to know the truth? Let’s face it – the US has been doing LOTS of dirty shit over the last 60 years that they’ve managed to keep mostly quiet… who shot JFK again?
Do you think the USA had motivation for faking it? Sure – the cold war, space race, investment in the military industrial complex, etc. JFK said they were going to do it before the decade was out – how would it looked if they failed?
Do you realize all of the moon landings – ALL OF THEM – happened during Richard Nixon’s White House? Do you believe anything ELSE that came out of Nixon’s White House?
A few people asked me what evidence there is to suggest it was a hoax. I don’t have any and I don’t believe it *was* a hoax. HOWEVER… it got me thinking… if it WAS a hoax, what evidence WOULD there be? What evidence would we be searching for?
For that matter, it if was genuine, what evidence would it take to convince the skeptics?
I didn’t come up with any good answers. Do you have any?
by cameron | Jun 11, 2009 | philosophy, science
Scott Adams tells us about the illusion of time:
People keep sending me links to articles about how time is an illusion and not a quality of the universe. Apparently that is the common view of physicists. Scientists prefer concepts such as warped space-time and whatnot. I won’t pretend to understand any of that. The point is that science doesn’t recognize time — in the way we understand it — as a quality of the universe.
You might say time has something in common with God. Most people have a sense that both time and God exist, and they need both concepts to understand their own existence. Atheists and dyslexics (who experience time out of order) are the minority.
Given that science can’t find evidence for either God or time, it takes a leap of faith to assume either one exists. Therefore, anything in our daily life that depends on either God or time is built on a foundation of faith and not science.
I’ve often thought that time is a property of memory. If you damaged the part of your brain that manages memory, to the hippocampus or surrounding cortices – say a combination of retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia – what would your experience of time likely be? If you couldn’t remember what happened five minutes ago – and you couldn’t use your memories to predict the future – wouldn’t your experience be just what’s happening right now? Strangely enough, this is what gurus have been telling us for a long, long time: "What’s wrong with right now?"
by cameron | Apr 26, 2009 | climate change, science
NYT has an article about how the “Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming. But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.”
What say you to that, climate change skeptics?
by cameron | Mar 23, 2009 | science
Interesting results from recent research done in Germany which seems to indicate that certain kinds of mental “states” assist us to remember data. For example, when asked to categorize words as pleasant or unpleasant, the test subjects had much better recall than when they were asked to categorize words as having two syllables or more than two. With words that were successfully recalled, researchers noticed “an increase in theta wave amplitude in the medial temporal lobe, beginning 250 ms before word presentation.”
BEFORE word presentation! So the brain was in a certain “state” before the word was presented. This reminds me a lot of Tony Robbins’ stuff. He talks about using NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) techniques when you are learning a new activity to put yourself into the right “state” for learning. I wonder how many educators consciously use techniques like this in schools?
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A team of researchers from Germany now show that the activity which immediately precedes an event is also important for memory formation. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report the identification of a signature brain state which occurs just before the appearance of a visual stimulus and predicts the successful encoding of it. The findings point to ways in which the process of memory formation could be enhanced.
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by cameron | Mar 16, 2009 | GDay World Live, science
So… I’ll be doing another live show tomorrow night (ie Tuesday) at 8pm QLD time / 9pm Sydney time. Put it in your diary and log in here. Will hopefully be road testing a new co-host (@joshuawithers), a Christian radio DJ, so that should provide some fun!
On the advice of Rai, I’ve got a rough plan. Each week, the live show will contain the following (roughly 15 minute long) segments:
BAD RELIGION – a story exploring how religious folks are a danger to us all
THE MASTER PLAN – a recent story concerning the game plan of the global elite
SCIENCE WORKS – a story from the world of science, unlocking the secrets of the ‘verse
CAM’S LIBRARY – as you know, I read a lot. So I thought I’m share one of the books I’m reading at the moment.
I’m going to try to set it up so you can actually come ONTO the show as well, audio style. Either just using uStream or via Skype. So if you’re interested in being on the show, let me know.
Hope you’ll join me.
by cameron | Feb 24, 2009 | science, Uncategorized
My project with my kids this month is to teach them the scientific method. I think that this is perhaps one of the most important things we can teach our kids. They obviously aren’t doing a good enough job of it in the schools. If they did, I wouldn’t have so many bozos say to me “science doesn’t know everything” when trying to justify their irrational belief in Jesus or crystal healing or Mayan predictions of the end of the world. So it’s up to us to teach our kids why the scientific method is the best way that humans have so-far devised to work out what is likely to be true when it comes to working out how the universe works. It’s not just important for sorting out fact from fiction when it comes to things like religion, either. Having a solid evidential view of things is important when politicians tell you things such as “Saddam has WMD – believe me.” As a society we need to start asking “show me the evidence” to our religious, political, military and corporate leaders on a more regular basis.
So on the weekend I set my kids a project to give me a 5 minute presentation on the scientific method before they could turn the XBOX on. They knew nothing about it before they started. So I told them to Google it and to specifically look for sites that explained it in kid-friendly terms (bonus lesson contained within – how to create good search terms in Google). I told them to answer four questions in their presentation:
1. What is it?
2. Why is it important?
3. What is the process?
4. Who invented it and when? (trick question but worth asking so they get some perspective on the history)
They came out after about 30 minutes and presented what they had. It was about one minute long. They basically just wrote down a one line answer to each question which they had copied and pasted from different sites. When I did the Q&A they failed. So I sent them back to expand on it a bit. This process went on about 3 or 4 times until they were finally able to present on it credibly for 5 minutes including a Q&A.
Later that day I re-inforced their understanding and ability to communicate it in the pool when we played “science swim”. This is a variation on a game I often play with them in the pool, the other variants being “spell swim” and “maths swim”. The basic idea is that I ask them both a question. In this case “What’s the first step in the scientific method?”. The first person to answer it correctly gets a pass. The one who either gets it wrong or is too slow, has to swim two laps (bonus lesson contained within – improves their swimming ability).
I’ve kept it up over the last couple of days while walking them to school, asking them to explain, in their own words, why the scientific method is the best way to determine fact from fiction. They are getting pretty good at it. I’ll keep this up for the next few weeks until it’s drilled into them. Then we’ll start on the theory of evolution.
